Friday, August 11, 2006

Cool 'n Quiet-->not until yesterday!!

well well..........the irony.... all morning in class i was tlkin to asb abt AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet and how it was saving me power while I left my pc on for downloading during night and all. I happened to read biosbhai's blog about how he helped codenamegp underclock his Athlon 64 using a utility named RMClock to save power. i askd biosbhai about it and with his guidance started to attempt to underclock. I could lower the VID ratings only till 1.1V and not till 0.9V which was da value he suggested. That was when i noticed something wierd. The Clock & Throttle graph in RMClock kept showing 1800 MHz even when my CPU usage was 0% which was weird as both my proc and mobo supported c'n'q but its effects were clearly not showing which came as bit of a shock to me. I checked and upgraded the CPU drivers....but no use, checkd an option in the BIOS that set "AMD Cool'n'Quiet" to auto which was the choice before. Then biosbhai tld me to set the power scheme in win xp to "max battery" which was a necessity for c'n'q to function. Tough luck:( consulted my mobo manual. It said o enable stable functioning of c'nq id have to plug in a RAM module to slot 1. I had my current modules pluggd into slots 3 & 4. i opened up my case and changed even that. Still no use. Thats when biosbhai found dat true cool'n'quiet functionality was introduced in BIOS verison 3.8 which was released a cpl of months after i bought my pc and told me to flash my bios:-s Was always "afraid" of doing that as even slight mistakes cld render my comp useless for some time before i revoked the mobo's warranty. And i didnt hv a spare floppy so dat i cld backup my xisting bios in case something went wrng. Took biosbhai's advice to take the risk and flashd my BIOS. Just tuk about half a minute:). Rebooted and saw some new additions like able to ramp up the memory shared for the onboard grfx all the way upto 256MB(not much use...but still:D). Now cool'n quiet wrks perfectly. Wheneven CPU idles proc underclocks to 995MHz with a FID of 5.0x at 1.1V but still cldnt lower it to 0.9. Anyway im satisfied now. and to think of all the electricity i wasted the past year[sigh!]. Heres a screenshot of Cool'nQuiet in action with a cpu usage of 31% while the pc's runnin utorrent, winamp and yahoo msngr. Note the clock&throttle graph(CPU runs at 995MHz).